[cypress66]

Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big mismanagement.

Just having 30 extra good software engineers focusing on AI would have made such a massive difference, because it's so bad that there's a lot of low hanging fruit.

As someone who was pretty invested in AMD stock since 2018, it always made me pretty angry how bad they managed the AI side. Had they done it well, just from the current AI hype the stock would probably be worth 50 bucks more.

[metaphor]

> Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big mismanagement.

Hindsight bias much?

How easily we forget in today's speculative AI bubble that AMD rolled into 2018[1] with 6.1x levered D/E and substantial business uncertainty while the Fed was actively ratcheting interest rates up, and ended the fiscal year still 3.3x levered despite turning operationally profitable[2].

> Had they done it well, just from the current AI hype the stock would probably be worth 50 bucks more.

It strikes me as pretty audacious and quite unconscionable to assert "big mismanagement" while simultaneously crying about speculative short-term profit taking opportunities.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248818000...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248819000...

[xuki]

Hey the stock only 10x since 2018, we could do better, couldn’t we?

[cypress66]

Not really hindsight bias.

As someone who had like 25% of their portfolio in AMD, it was pretty infuriating being forced to buy Nvidia GPUs every single time because the AMD ones were literally useless to me (lack of AI support and cuda in general).

Yes, there's AI hype right now. But Nvidia gpu datacenter growth isn't new. And AMd were asleep

[roenxi]

Not asleep; they just directed their efforts at things that haven't worked out. With their APU lines it looked like they wanted to integrate GPUs completely into the CPU - that was hardly asleep to the importance of GPU compute.

The problem they ran in to looks to me to be that they focused on targeting a cost-effective low end market and were caught off-guard by how machine learning workloads work in practice - huge burst of compute to train, then much lower requirements to do inference. That isn't something they were strategically prepared for and that isn't something that software industry has seen before either.

Won't save them from market forces, but their choices to date have been reasonable.

[metaphor]

Look long and hard at AMD's financials circa 2015[1]...for the sake of anticipated TL;DR, here are a few summary highlights:

  - -27.5% YoY revenue decline
  - -6.3% YoY gross margin decline
  - -$481M operating loss
  - $230M short-term debt
  - $388M non-cancelable operating lease commitments
  - $538M unconditional purchase commitments
  - $2.032B long-term debt (!)
  - -$412M stockholders' deficit (!!)

Seriously, look long and hard at those numbers, and when you think you understand what they might mean, consider them again and again until the feeling of insurmountable adversity sinks in and you're on your knees begging public equity markets for an ounce of capital and a pinch of courtesy faith...on the promise of meaningful risk-adjusted ROIC to be delivered in just a few years.

> But Nvidia gpu datacenter growth isn't new. And AMd were asleep

...which is why this remark comes off as sheer arrogance (no disrespect).

Su and the rest of AMD leadership certainly weren't asleep. The difference here is while you're busy scouting speculative waters defended by competition with deep battle pockets and an even deeper technical moat, Su was simply preoccupied bringing a zombie company back to life and building up enough health to slay a weaker giant.

Personally, I was already beyond impressed with one miracle delivered.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248816000...

[ksec]

>As someone who had like 25% of their portfolio in AMD

>Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big mismanagement.

I guess you know they have debt, and they were paying them off, and were battling with other issues all the way till 2019 / 2020 when Intel had their misstep so they could gain something in the CPU server market?

[cypress66]

Yes. And they still could have afforded 30 software engineers to work on ai/compute painpoints.

But let's asume they thought it was too expensive back then. There's still no reason not to invest in software in 2020 when their gross margin was absurd.

[MontyCarloHall]

Yup. Have 15 of those software engineers contribute pull requests to PyTorch to make its OpenCL support on par with CUDA and take the other 15 engineers to do the same for TensorFlow and AMD would already be a serious contender in the AI space.

[cma]

Does AMD have tensor cores?